A Brave Jewish Voice in Putin's Russia

I first tried to interview Yevgenia Albats in 1990 when I was a journalist on my first trip back to Moscow, the city where I was born and had left 10 years earlier when I emigrated to the U.S. at the age of 16. I was doing research for an article about women and politics in the Soviet Union at a time when the country was in political flux, just before the fall of the Soviet Union, and spaces for political activity had opened up; Albats was one of the leading female voices in the male-dominated field of political journalism. When I approached her at some event and asked for an interview, she was friendly enough but showed little interest in anything that could be labeled as women’s issues.